The True History of Thanksgiving

Why Everything You Know About Thanksgiving History Is Wrong

5. Thanksgiving Has Always Been Celebrated

Also, while we may think of Thanksgiving as being a big deal for 400 years, it's actually President Lincoln who made it a national holiday in the middle of the Civil War in 1863 as thanks for the fact that the war was finally going according to plan. It was just wartime politics that changed the history of Thanksgiving forever by making it a national holiday. Before that it wasn't as regular a celebration, and would only be held nationally on an intermittent basis. Earlier significant incarnations of the holiday came during the Revolutionary War. So if you think about it, in the beginning a big part of Thanksgiving was celebrating the fact that they were killing people more successfully than before. Heartwarming, huh?

"Abe says if we butcher the rest of the enemy, we get free yams!" (Currier and Ives, Wikimedia Commons)

6. The Pardoning Of The Turkeys Is A Longstanding Tradition

The presidential pardoning of a turkey is one of those cute folksy old traditions that seems to date back forever. But as Brad Plumer at the Washington Post pointed out, the pardoning of the turkeys only started in 1987, when then-President Ronald Reagan used the ploy as a way to distract people from the fact that he'd kinda-sorta been illegally selling arms to Iran and then funneling the cash to a violent Nicaraguan rebel movement. It turns out before that, presidents DID receive a couple of donated turkeys, which they would promptly butcher and devour, presumably with sides of cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes, which by now had made it onto the Thanksgiving table.

The tradition of US presidents getting into political scandals was long-established though, and so in 1989 when President Bush found himself in hot water, and, showing he hadn't learned nothing as vice-president, pardoned a turkey as another distraction. We've been doing it consistently ever since.